Superfans

Back in February, Major League Baseball called Paul DiMeo, a designer for ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” with an idea: “We want to build ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,’ with baseball running through it, for hipsters.” More concretely, they wanted a room where two guys could watch every baseball game in the 2011 season—2,429 games in six months. “They got in touch with me because I’ve done so many kids’ rooms,” DiMeo said. “I guess they thought it might translate.”

This would be the M.L.B. Fan Cave, and its occupants would be Mike O’Hara, the thirty-seven-year-old lead singer of the Mighty Regis, an Irish punk band named for the talk-show host, and Ryan Wagner, a twenty-six-year-old actor most recently employed as the Cowardly Lion’s understudy in a touring production of “The Wizard of Oz.” Baseball fans consider themselves the most cultured in sports, and some saw the Fan Cave in philosophical terms. “If we had to come up with Plato’s Allegory of the Fan Cave, what would the allegory be?” one baseball blogger asked. “Do you think when they see out of the Fan Cave, they see the people in the street are just shadows?” Wagner and O’Hara had more practical concerns. O’Hara said of his fiancée, “I owe her a nice vacation.” Wagner added, “I had a girlfriend when I came here. Look at me now.” (He’s single.)

It was the last day of baseball’s regular season, and the 7 P.M. slate of games was just beginning. The pair had already watched more than six thousand hours of baseball. Only eleven games remained. “We’re going crazy,” Wagner said, plopping down on an L-shaped couch. He and O’Hara had dressed up for the occasion—jeans and T-shirts had been typical—and O’Hara wore a collared shirt, untucked, beneath a black sweater, as if he had just come home from the office. He settled into the couch and yanked the collar loose. “And then depression set in,” he said, looking at his feet.

Major League Baseball had advertised the Fan Cave as a “dream job.” Ten thousand people applied. (Five per cent were women.) Wagner and O’Hara nibbled on cheeseburgers, macaroni-and-cheese, and Philly cheesesteaks—they had made a vow early in the season to eat salads for lunch—while searching for ways to explain their experience. “There was this moment after the All-Star Game of ‘Man, that’s just half the season,’ ” Wagner said. O’Hara jumped in. “It was almost like Wednesday on spring break when you partied a little hard on Tuesday night,” he said. “You’re having fun, but you’re like, ‘Wow, I don’t know if I can keep doing this.’ ”

The Fan Cave is on the corner of East Fourth Street and Broadway, inside the old Tower Records space. Among the items a fan apparently needs: air-hockey, pool, and shuffleboard tables; a jukebox; a beer refrigerator and a soda refrigerator; multiple video-game consoles; and several commissioned pieces of art (a Styrofoam statue of Willie Mays; Jay-Z, in a Yankees cap, made of gumballs). The centerpiece is a wall of fifteen televisions, each showing a different game. “You have to think of it like driving,” O’Hara said, explaining how to maintain focus on fifteen televisions at once. “You keep your eyes on the road, then you check your mirrors.”

On a pair of side-by-side screens, the Yankees, O’Hara’s team, were winning (they would lose) and the Orioles, Wagner’s, were losing (they would win). “Is it raining?” Wagner said, of the game in Baltimore. Rain delays are the Fan Cave’s worst nightmare. It was just past 9 P.M., and O’Hara wiped his eyes, which were bloodshot from the night before, when the last game had ended at 1:33 A.M. Back in April, a game in San Diego had finished, after four delays, at four-forty in the morning.

Wagner played “The Best Is Yet to Come” on a stereo—they preferred, for sanity’s sake, to watch the games on mute—and O’Hara called his fiancée. The rain eventually stopped, and the games continued. Just after twelve-thirty, Mike Carp, of the Seattle Mariners, struck out swinging: the last out of the year. Only the playoffs, which would briefly feature O’Hara’s Yankees, remained. “It’s like listening to your favorite record,” O’Hara said, of watching the entire season. “You want to listen from tracks one through thirteen, and, sure, maybe the fourth track isn’t one of your favorites—maybe it’s a little long—but that fifth track brings it back to being a classic.” Wagner noted that there were 2,429 tracks on this album. O’Hara nodded. “This is more of an anthology.” ♦